


Aplomb (the lead in the wing remix)

by Runespoor



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Whoever has the luck to 8e 8orn a character can laugh even at death. 8ecause a character will never die!" - Aranea S.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aplomb (the lead in the wing remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Never Make Me Wonder](https://archiveofourown.org/works/232926) by [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist). 



> this is less a remix than a homage (a fanfic of a fanfic, if you like), and as such will not make a lick of sense unless you read the original first.
> 
> also I’m afraid the title/subtitle is a bilingual pun: 'lead' is 'plomb' in French. I have no excuses except the fact that it makes all the sense for Vriska.

You remember dying. 

The memories are sky-clear on your mind; the sharp burn of Terezi’s blade running through your chest, the torturous drip-drip-drip of your blood on the stone bed. 

You died twice, and you remember both, and when other-John tells you it was a bad thing your mind flashes back to the pain. 

Dying was the longest thing that’d ever happened to you, drawing on like days. You suffocated on the blood in your throat, and you felt your strength deserting you with every drop, until you couldn’t move at all, your limbs lead. 

When John says maybe you didn’t have all the luck he makes it sound like it was going on even longer than you thought: like secretly you were dying your entire life. 

Maybe you started in reverse. Your life stretched backward from your death - the shiniest point - to the ill-defined shadows of the caves grubs wander, ghost-like. Like when you got your lusus, you were already dying a little. 

If you listen to him, by the time you were playing FLARP, you were bleeding out friends from every pore, and the only luck you had is that you lasted as long as you did. 

Which strikes you as funny, given that both times you died due to blood loss. Ruptured organs helped, but mostly blood loss. It takes more damage than Terezi’s skewer-stab blade to kill a troll; from your room, you’ve heard plenty of trolls less tough than you howling themselves raw when Spidermom had sliced them open a long time ago.

You _ex•san•gui•na•ted_ to death, drowning into a puddle of your own blood in a sun-bathed crypt of your land. 

After Tavros was gone and the echoes of his whimpers and gasping sobs died out, the only sound was your blood trickling on the stone. Broken shards of your bones rubbed together when you tried to breathe, you body broken into new shapes. Some parts of you felt boneless, crushed to a pulp under Aradia’s metal fists. 

You drifted in and out of daymares, the plick-plock of your blood like the tick-tock of a clock counting down to your death, like the beats of your heart would have if it’d still be strong enough to push blood. It drummed and echoed and hurt in your bones, each drop like it was being pulled out of you.

You think you may have been crying.

It took you a long time to die.

You meant to tell Terezi, after you’d made God Tier, that exsanguination really is as messy and painful as her books claimed - back when you were Team Scourge and her Legislacerator handbooks were full of that kind of detail. That’s how you learned the word in the first place, with Terezi reading aloud, all delight for new knowledge and gleeful, anticipated sadism. You’d spent the next half-hour learning to enunciate the word, until neither of you stumbled on it anymore - how em8arassing, if Marquise Spinneret Mindfang couldn’t pronounce it properly!

But you didn’t. Too many irons in your fire. 

Terezi’s sword pierced through your innards. It went in, half-slicing half-shredding, and it raked against your spine when she forced it through, and you felt it -- doing things inside you, squelching, catching against your bones. The pain spiked so high you wanted to hurl, and you couldn’t move.

Sometimes you curl in on yourself, your hands over your breastbone. You’re not sure how to breathe or how to move, like you’re carrying it on the inside, even though there’s no scar. It’s an invisible brand, and when you glance down you’re startled that your top isn’t drenched in your blood where the sword went through you. 

When she took her blade out it was like being torn inside-out. 

It must have been faster, you don’t think you remember as much. That’s confusing, because it felt like it lasted forever, and Aradia wasn’t there.

You remember thinking that it hurt worse than the first time, because it was _Terezi_ and she’d stabbed you in the back and you were hoping you could be the Scourge Sisters again and she’d tell you she hated you, and then you thought that no, Tavros didn’t do anything to make it faster, that was way worse, then-- you got confused about which kind of pain you meant.

You’re still not sure which hurt the worse, when you bother to think about it at all. 

You don’t tell John. He’d say you have no luck again, and it’s only because you pity the boy so much you don’t get _so angry_ at him for daring to insult you. 

He doesn’t understand. You’ve died twice, but you’ve killed a lot more than that. You know you have all of the luck, because when you died, you never screamed.


End file.
